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Don Martin | Blog

Watching Justin Trudeau’s daily COVID-19 briefings lately is to believe the time has come to shelve the ritual as being well beyond its best-before date. Then came Tuesday's 21 seconds of silence, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

When it comes to pandoptics, in real words being displays of shared symbolic pain during this COVID-19 crisis, Justin Trudeau is without equal in Canadian and perhaps global politics, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Prolonged self-isolation by select provinces from the rest of the country isn’t just uneconomical and most likely unconstitutional, it’s un-Canadian, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Consider the unfathomable: We’re now in a country where Conservatives like premiers Doug Ford, Scott Moe and Brian Pallister look statesman-like while the federal lame-duck leader and his wannabes appear increasingly pathetic, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Strange twists in perspective are developing as we collectively tumble down the rabbit hole of this COVID-19 pandemic. Normal fixations have been displaced by a hungering for the sights and sounds of routine experiences that, just four months ago, might’ve been irritating, irrational or unworthy of a second thought, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

The true test of my lingering Alberta DNA is fretting at the lowest gas pump prices in a generation, writes Don Martin in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca. Those 70-cent litres are the hemorrhaging lifeblood of an Alberta tumbling into an economic abyss.

The prime minister must continue hammering home the need for stay-at-home resolve until the virus is vanquished or we’ll be doomed to repeat our forgotten history, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Thursday's news flow was a three-dumpster-fire trash-takeout for the ages, a bombardment of unplanned bundling that defined the scope, scale and severity of the pandemic in a series of devastating charts and slides, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly cautioned business against gaming a multi-pronged COVID-19 response built almost entirely on faith, but stops short of vowing retroactive auditing to ensure these megabillions were legitimately claimed. But that needs to be done when this pandemic has passed and the final bills are tallied up, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

The Canada-U.S. border would become much more than a line of political demarcation if U.S. President Donald Trump enacts his Easter economic resurrection over the dire warnings of his own public health experts, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

For years it's taken considerable self-restraint not to throw my remote at the television screen whenever the prime minister was speaking. Justin Trudeau's script-written sincerity, delivered with all the critical mass of candy floss, was infuriatingly hard to swallow. Not any more. Justin Trudeau is growing up before our eyes, writes Don Martin.

Canadian snowbirds should avoid discussing U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida, Don Martin writes from Fort Myers in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca. In restaurants you get shushed by local guests if you raise Trump’s controversial behaviour within earshot of other diners. It’s much safer to discuss whether the local lagoon alligator is getting too big and needs to be relocated to the boot factory.

It’s easy to feel empathy for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s no-win predicament over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which has unleashed sympathy protests and paralyzed rail service across Canada. Every course of action will be seen as wrong and nail his political popularity with a hammer, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

Unless the prime minister wants to do one of his white knight charges onto the battlefield with cameras rolling, armed with good intentions that aren’t nearly good enough, Justin Trudeau might as well stay an ocean away from the Wet’suwet’en conflict, safely delivering mush into the microphones, Don Martin writes in his latest column on CTVNews.ca.

With every indication pointing to a victory-bound cakewalk to the Conservative leadership for Peter MacKay, if not an outright coronation, the former Harper cabinet minister is being media-microscoped with every misstep getting breathless billboard-sized exposure, Don Martin writes in his weekly column for CTVNews.ca.

'The longer he’s not prime minister, the more interesting and influential Stephen Harper becomes,' says Don Martin in a column on CTVNews.ca where he discusses how Harper has evolved into an elder statesman.